How to Deal With Temporarily Out-of-Stock Pages?

Ecommerce store have to deal with the challenges that come with a product being “out of stock” from time to time. How you choose to communicate this information to your customers is critical. With the right strategy, you can actually use “out of stock” items to win and drive sales.

What to do?

When dealing with out of stock pages, you should have two primary objectives.

Reduce SEO impact. Out of stock pages tend to have high bounce rates and a large number of such pages can negatively affect your rankings.

Drive customers to relevant products to win sales. An out of stock product should not be a dead end to the sales process. Your objective should be to direct customers to additional products that might lead to a sale.

1. Identify the root cause of out of stock

Generally, there are four common out of stock scenarios:

Temporary unavailability: These products are unavailable for a short period of time (1-4 weeks). For example, a brand of shoes may be temporarily unavailable due to a machine malfunction at its manufacturing facility halting production.

Seasonal unavailability: Most seasonal unavailability is a business decision. A clothing store might choose to sell its warm jackets only during winters.

Discontinued products: Unfortunately, there are times when a product is no longer profitable to sell. In such cases, these products are discontinued and no longer manufactured for sale.

Indefinitely out of stock: This scenario is reserved for products that are unavailable and you are unsure when they will be back on sale.

Each of these four scenarios needs to be tackled differently. If a product is temporarily or seasonally unavailable, you can keep the product page up and communicate unavailability to customers.

However, in case of discontinued products, you need to communicate so to buyers and redirect them to a more relevant page after a sufficient amount of time has elapsed.

2. Display out of stock status clearly

If your product is unavailable, be clear about it.

You don’t want to confuse customers with conflicting messages that leave them wondering about the product status.

The “Out of Stock” message should be clear at the top of the page, when a user is searching for the product.

The Homepage Redirect

If your product is permanently out of stock, it is recommend that you permanently redirect the old page to the next best relevant page on your site, allowing Google to pass the authority from the old page to the new pages.

The 404 Page

Another common mistake is the 404 page aka “not found”. When this happens, the user assumes that your site is broken. Indeed it is. Too many 404 errors also raise a red flag with Google and search bots.

Grey out your add-to-cart option

This lets your customers know that something is amiss (especially those who directly proceed to checkout)

Also, make sure to indicate whether the entire product is out of stock or only a subset of it.

For example, T-shirts come in various sizes and colors. Moreover, if only a few combinations are unavailable you do not want to mark the whole item out of stock.

Visualize unavailability in category pages and search results

Saying that a product is unavailable in the product description is not enough. It still means that a customer would click through to a product, read the ‘out of stock’ message, and then hit the back button. This results in poor user experience.

Customers should know in category pages/search results whether your product is available or not. This way you can prevent customers from clicking-through to out of stock items unless they want to find out more information.

There are several tactics to do this:

A. Gray out product image

The most popular tactic is to gray out the product image to imply unavailability. Some stores also add an ‘out of stock’ banner. The grayed-out image visualizes the out of stock issue when contrasted against the regular product image.

Use Out of Stock Message

Another tactic is to use a temporary ‘out of stock’ message below the product image.

It is important to make this message easy to spot. Choose a large font and bold colours to visualize unavailability.

Show availability for different sizes

What about products in different sizes?

In such cases, you can show size availability when users hover over the product image. For example, unavailable shoe sizes are grayed out.

The easiest option would be to simply show an out of stock message on category/search pages. The best course of action, however, would be to gray out the product picture and use other visual indicators to imply unavailability.

4. Display the period of your product availability

Some items are only profitable to sell during a specific time.

For example, stocking your inventory with Christmas-related items during the peak summer months serves little purpose for your bottom line and wastes precious space.

If you have such seasonal products, display the period your product is available for.

You can even accept pre-orders for such products to maximize sales in the off-season. Since customers will not expect their product until a predefined time, you can ship products later without having to store them.

5. Show related items

With visitors on your site looking to buy, your objective should remain to push customers towards completing a purchase and therefore cross sell.

If a selected product is unavailable, show customers related products on the same page.

This prevents customers from leaving your store and lets them continue with their shopping experience.

Follow this guideline for what to recommend in terms of priority:

Option one

The most effective recommendations are those, which display the same product (in a different color) or similar products from the same brand.

Option Two

Alternatively, you can direct customers to newly launched products from the same product range.

A new product is attractive to customers as it elicits a sense of ‘exclusiveness’.

You can also show customers the best selling products from your lineup. Ideally, you want these to be from the same category as the product they were browsing.

You can also try showing products from the same designer/brand even if they are from a different category.

Option Three

If you cannot show customers an alternative to the same product from the same brand/designer, consider suggesting best-selling alternatives from the same category.

For example, if customers are looking at a jacket from one brand, recommend them similar jackets from different brands in the market.

Customers have the option to browse similar items either from the same designer or from the same product category.

6. Capture emails to remind customers of product availability

Not every customer bookmarks an out of stock product and those that do eventually become frustrated to check its status every day. It is much easier to go to a competitor site than wait to around in the dark for a product.

Therefore, remind customers through email when your product returns in stock.

7. Extend shipping and handling time

Unlike in-store shopping, customers do not expect their product right away.

After placing an order, customers must wait for shipping before getting their hands on your product and you can take this delay to your advantage.

Instead of stating your product is unavailable, you increase your stated shipping time.

For example, if you know your product is unavailable for a very short time frame (for example, 2-4 days), you can use this trick to hide product unavailability.

This keeps your sales flowing without breaking customer trust.

However, be careful not to extend shipping time by too much. A lengthy shipping and handling time can discourage customers from purchasing your product altogether.

8. Push your unavailable product to the bottom of your product category page

Shoppers rarely land directly on your product page. Instead, they follow one of two navigational paths to find what they are looking for. The first involves them following your site’s pre-defined navigation menu. For example, to shop for men’s jacket a customer may click on Clothing > Men’s Clothing > Top Wear > Jackets to see a list of results and in the second path, a customer can utilize your site’s search engine.

For example, a customer searches for “Men’s Jackets” to see their options.

Whichever path customers decide to take, don’t list out of stock items among the first few items. Instead, push them to the bottom of the product list.

Giving 404

Yes, if you have a mid-size site and the product is never coming back, you can consider making out of stock product pages 404.

Though, consider going the extra mile to create a custom 404 page so that you do not lose all sales potential. Why? Not only is landing on a 404 a bad experience, but there are many negative SEO implications.

What about 301 redirects, instead?

Think through where you will redirect to, though. It should be as relevant as possible. No one wants to be redirected back to the homepage. Most people do not even want to be redirected back to a category page.

Put yourself in the visitor’s shoes and try to be as relevant and useful as possible.

Use the dynamically generated messages to explain why they are being redirected and to where.

To conclude, whether you are an e-commerce site selling clothes, house products or toys to banking, cars & travel, there will always be a time where “not found” pages exist. Depending on the strategy of the page, we recommend different actions.

Here at Dreier Digital, we can help you with that. Understanding the objective of the broken pages etc and accordingly recommend what the action should be.

Dreier Digital is a boutique Digital Marketing Agency based in London. Our client base spans globally from USA, Europe, Australia, UK and more. We specialise in a wide range of digital marketing verticals including but not limited to: SEO, Content Marketing, Digital Strategy, Influencer Marketing, Website Analytics, & Digital Training and more.